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Sunday, November 29

Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is a labor of love. It is about
how the reader ends up loving a dysfunctional, drifting man, promiscuous,
abusive, with a strange sense of humor, always in search of illegal money.
Denis Johnson has the boldness to ask the reader to validate such a character
because there is so much love that resides at the very nature of him. If you
put love into your craft, it shows in the language, the story, the people, and
the cracks. In a word, beauty transcends the obvious flaws in the character's
humane doings and mirrors back into the one holding the book:

This boat was pulling behind itself a tremendous triangular kite on a rope.
From the kite, up in the air a hundred feet or so, a woman was suspended,
belted in somehow, I would have guessed. She had long red hair. She was
delicate and white, and naked except for her beautiful hair.

This is from Work,
a short story where two men tear down an abandoned house, pulling at the wires,
breaking the wooden walls, tired, sweaty and hungry for a quick buck. Outside
the window, such vision works as a madeleine to the narrator,
and later on, as Wayne admits it his house he is dismantling, they meet his
former wife. It seems to be the same red-haired beauty gliding over the river but
Wayne denies it so the narrator concludes he softly must have stepped into his
friend's dream. One man's dreams are but another's trigger of nostalgia. All
women who ever embraced, loved, hated or left him come queuing in his mind: ''Where
are all my women now, with their sweet wet words and way, and the miraculous
balls of hail popping a green translucence in the yards?''The imagery of such a
memory, the way it sneaks up on the narrator, soft as a summer breeze, aching
like an old wound, then pours out into such vivid words, makes the world
spins less in slow motion. The narrator stays on one side of it and then this
snippet of life stretches way back to you, on the other side. into your very
world. You have been touched.

Some writers stand poets in disguise
and Denis Johnson is among them. His prose is unadorned, direct, undressed of
any artifice or pretense, yet his very essence and ability to see the hidden
face of things and people alike penetrate the bare accounts and glitters. His
economy of words reminds one of Hemingway or Carver, Johnson’s
teacher, yet there is a new layer added to every sequence, rendering it into a
unique piece of poetry. These stories of the fallen reminded me of Lucia
Berlin’s women who stand at the very end of society, flawed and disallowed,
yet making significant human beings.

Denis Johnson called his work ‘a
zoo of wild utterances’ thus pointing to the variety of human being walking
the very perimeter of his mind. Such characters are bound to breathe in the
very metaphor of life as it filters through the mind and heart of their maker.
In Dundun, another remarkable little charm, the soy crop is depicted as ‘the
failed, wilted cornstalks…laid out on the ground like rows of underthings’.
In another, a country fair looks back at the world ‘with sad resignation…bare
its breasts.’ It honestly makes you crave for the touch of such places,
such a man, such words engulfing the very edge of your senses.

Saturday, November 21

I dream in books and live inside them for a significant part of my days, unaware at times where reality and fiction cease to draw a defining line. Such habit turns into an unexpected pleasure whenever I pick the right book. All books are lovable and worth my time, but some of them are hard to part from- A manual for cleaning women by Lucia Berlin would stand out in any remarkable pile. It is close to perfection in style, simplicity, choice of words or genuineness.

Lucia Berlin is called one of America's best kept secrets. She spent her life writing and living, never acquiring much fame, doing menial jobs that inspired her to write wonderfully. She had to face health problems and she managed to do so elegantly, drawing upon each of her experiences to recreate a snippet of life in her stories. She loved, she mothered, she read, she lived. Looking at her in the sepia-toned photos, I find her coy, dainty, simple. Still, she had so much life inside that one cannot read her work and not feel alive. So many lives are captured and rendered beautifully worthy in her pages that after reading her work, I could add that she loved people. Tremendously.

A manual for cleaning women is a collection of stories that read like John Cheever, Raymond, Carver, or Grace Paley. There is such love for small people, living dangerously or in great simplicity, depending on how you choose to see their lives. She was one of them so there is a shred of personal sensitivity in every page. She was a mother of four, divorced, alcoholic, cleaning rich people's houses herself. She knows that behind failures and addictions, there is poetry revealed in a reckless manner. You get a peak into the lives filled with of alcohol, drug use, abortions, loneliness, disease, alienation. Still, you feel close to the characters because she feels so familiar with them, so intimate in depicting their lives or her own that every little aspect seems easy and natural. At times, the stories read like a memoir, a detailed accounting of a life spent in different places, alongside wounded people. Mining towns, coin laundries, hospitals, Mexico, hotels, emergency rooms all become unsurprising locations for her stories filled with compassion, wittiness and love.

Lucia Berlin's stories carry more weight than you would expect, more spunk than one would hope for. They flow into the reader, fill in the crevasses and exult into the clear need to be read again. They get a grip on you and hold you inside with their realism, beauty and grace. They are stories meant to haunt you in good and bad times with their engrossing power.